Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal
Shennette Garrett-Scott
Columbia University Press
Between 1888 and 1930, African Americans opened more than a hundred banks and thousands of other financial institutions. Banking on Freedom explores this rich period of Black financial innovation and its transformative impact on U.S. capitalism through the story of the St. Luke Bank in Richmond, Virginia: the first and only bank run by Black women.